IMPRESSIONS Gallery's autumn show, Charade, is a commission for the BBC's Shooting Live Artists project.
Launched at SightSonic 2003, York's International Digital Arts Festival, Charade explores notions of identity, fantasy and performance through the work of George Chakravarthi, Leslie Hill & Helen Paris, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard and Lisa Watts & Brian McClave. Each plays with the conventions of live art in pieces that combine digital media and installation.
In Bar Flies, Chakravarthi "takes a step beyond reality", starring as Maureen, Jasmine and Claire in a video triptych of parallel lives played out in bars, clubs and pubs.
Hill & Paris place the viewer in the crowd at the notorious 1913 Derby Day Suffragette demonstration in the hypnotic Suffragettes Invented Performance Art. Using real archive footage, they re-locate the demonstration within the larger history of politics and performance.
Watts's collaboration with McClave, Escape Mechanism, is viewed through 3D glasses. Watts trained in secret with an escapologist to unlock the secrets of Houdini's straitjacket escape, and in her hallucinatory video performance, she is shown bound upside down, hanging from a chain, as she strives to struggle free.
In File Under Sacred Music, Forsyth & Pollard re-enact The Cramps' 1978 performance at Napa Mental Institute, inspired by the bootleg video of that concert. On film, performers copy the spontaneous, shambolic moves of The Cramps' Poison Ivy and Lux Interior as Forsyth & Pollard re-create the original show in meticulous detail.
Charade runs until December 6; opening hours are 10am to 5.30pm, Tuesday to Saturday, and admission is free.
Updated: 09:35 Friday, October 31, 2003
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